UFC 94 Heats Up With 'Primetime: Georges St. Pierre vs. B.J. Penn'

The Ultimate Fighting Championship is pulling out all the stops in promoting the upcoming fight between lightweight champion B.J. Penn and welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre, hyping the UFC 94 main event with a three-part TV special that takes viewers inside the lives of the fighters. That special, UFC Primetime, debuts tonight on Spike, and after seeing a rough cut of the first episode, I came away extremely impressed.

The show works as a commercial to get people to buy the St. Pierre-Penn fight on pay-per-view, but it also works on its own merits: This is good documentary filmmaking.

Penn and St. Pierre are presented as a study in contrasts: Penn comes across as cocky while St. Pierre exudes a quieter confidence. Penn grew up rich and St. Pierre grew up poor. Penn trains in the tropics while St. Pierre trains in the tundra. (We're told that it's 86 degrees in Hilo, Hawaii, where Penn lives, and it's 2 degrees in Montreal, where St. Pierre lives.)

Early in the first episode, St. Pierre and Penn reflect on their previous fight, in 2006, which St. Pierre won by split decision. Penn is still angry that he lost, and he says St. Pierre never hurt him: "The only pain was in my hands from punching his head."

Primetime shows the fighters at the gym and in their personal lives (St. Pierre is seen hanging out at a Montreal discotheque), but the best pieces come when the two of them talk about each other. In one exchange, Penn says of St. Pierre, "He's a great fighter, but he's a quitter. He's a frontrunner."

St. Pierre responds to that by questioning Penn's street cred: "B.J. thinks I'm a quitter? I'm not the one who comes from a wealthy family. I come from a poor environment."

Exchanges like that have been a staple of boxing's 24/7 series, and should only increase in the second and third episodes of Primetime, after Penn and St. Pierre have seen the footage of each other.

It will be particularly interesting to see what the two think of each other's training methods, because the biggest question heading into this fight is whether the sometimes doughy Penn will show up as well conditioned as the always chiseled St. Pierre.

Although Penn is shown measuring his oatmeal and mixing a protein shake, it's not clear that he's taking his workouts as seriously as he should. The first episode ends with UFC President Dana White calling Penn to see how his training is going, only to have a vacationing Penn ignore White's call. When he can't reach Penn on the phone, White looks directly into the camera and tells Penn to "Get your ass back in the f***ing gym."

How will Penn respond to that? I'll be tuning in next week to find out.